Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side

Eighty-nine years of trans-Atlantic tragedy.

Irish writer Sebastian Barry—twice shortlisted for the Man
Booker Prize, called by Salon “the best prose writer in the English
language”—is one of the most ambitious writers today. His new book, On Canaan’s Side
(Viking, 272 pages, $25.95), the latest in his series of novels
documenting the epic travails of the Dunne family, touches on two world
wars, the Irish Republican Army, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War
and the Persian Gulf War, each one refracted as personal tragedy into
the life of its 89-year-old protagonist, the resilient Irish émigré
Lilly Bere.

This
pan-sentimental ambition, unfortunately, turns out to be the book’s
undoing. Because Lilly Bere, indeed, can’t catch a break. If there is a
war, her brother will die in it, her son will disappear, her grandson
will disappear himself because of it. Husbands are killed or they run
away. All jobs are demeaningly servile, offered by the petty to the
virtuous.

When George Eliot
wanted to capture the spirit of an age, she cast her net of characters
as broad as life itself; Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, made sly
postmodern winks at the sublimed Hegelian moment. But as here, when a
whole century of trans-Atlantic heartache is episodically brought to
bear on one unfortunate, unlikely human life—without even a lick of
irony—we have landed ourselves deep in the territory of melodrama, an
Irish American Tragedy forever drowning a girl in the lake. One
disappointment is hardly absorbed before we have moved on to the next,
each heartbreak not a function of character but rather of the capricious
and cruel nature of the world, which moves terribly swiftly. Lilly Bere
can’t catch a break.

The story is told
nonetheless as measured recollection, from the vantage of an old woman
whose heart has reached its limit. It is a tone and cadence that might
be familiar from Marilynne Robinson’s Home and Gilead,
less the voice of a person than of memory itself: lyrical intensity
stretched tightly across the frame of a slow, dignified cadence. But
where Robinson’s palette is thought and reckoning and redemption, Barry
aims to depict pain itself, as arrived at through a long chain of event
and simile.

This voice is
delivered with estimable skill—Barry really is a writer with a wonderful
ear for the music of a sentence—but this music also masks a certain
sloppiness in the image, a limpness in the metaphor. Even in the koan of
the book’s second sentence, “What is the sound of an
eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?” we have all the accoutrements of
sympathetic pain, and yet fundamentally it is a hollow high-drama
manipulation, something that should be uttered by a comic Mrs. Raftery
in a Grace Paley story. Because tragedy laid this thickly and earnestly,
with dialogue so threateningly on the nose (“The war did something to
me, Ma”), becomes not sad truth but simple dishonesty.